CSIRO scientists Dr Christine O'Keefe, Dr Warren Lin and Damien McAullay – part of the research team developing software for preserving privacy during analysis of health data

CSIRO has developed prototype software designed to enable researchers to analyse data vital to the development of public health initiatives without compromising the confidentiality of patients' medical records.

Whereas the traditional approach to protecting privacy has been to modify the data before releasing it to researchers, this software, known as Privacy-Preserving Analytics (PPA), is able to run secure analyses on unmodified data, giving more exact and reliable results.